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Talk about Adafruit Raspberry Pi® accessories! Please do not ask for Linux support, this is for Adafruit products only! For Raspberry Pi help please visit: http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/

Hello!I bought on the beginning of the month from a dealer, Microcenter in Westchester County NY, this critter:http://www.adafruit.com/products/954 Which is the USB to TTL Serial Cable. According to the site it uses the Prolific chipset.

Why? I don't know, and do not want to know. However the drivers that they write for Windows have a history of instability issues. I plugged it in this computer a total of twice so far. The first time was to confirm that it worked. Which it did.

The second time was to confirm that connecting it to the console setting on the Raspberry Pi (from a Makershed starter kit from last year) would provide me with a console. It did not. The messaging associated with any device that runs Linux crawled about half of the way down the program I was using and then nothing. In fact plugging it into my Linux computer caused its messaging to confirm that it was indeed working and came up as ttyUSB0 in the devices directory.

Connecting the Raspberry Pi back to power after bringing up a terminal screen on the Linux box who saw the serial connection caused me to end up with a proper Linux style console immediately the scrawl of start information ended. While I am not asking for support, I am indeed requesting that the good people back where Adafruit are located to please look into my statement and then issue an advisory of sorts.

When you say "The messaging associated with any device that runs Linux", I assume you mean the dmesg trace that gets dumped to the screen while the machine boots. I further assume you were connecting to the RasPi through `screen` or some other terminal emulator.

The fact that you saw the dmesg output means the cable works as it should. The RasPi boot sequence has a quirk where you need to hit a key once the dmesg trace ends before it will give you a login prompt.

When you void a product warranty, you give up your right to sue the manufacturer if something goes wrong and accept full responsibility for whatever happens next. And then you truly own the product.

adafruit_support_mike wrote:When you say "The messaging associated with any device that runs Linux", I assume you mean the dmesg trace that gets dumped to the screen while the machine boots. I further assume you were connecting to the RasPi through `screen` or some other terminal emulator.

The fact that you saw the dmesg output means the cable works as it should. The RasPi boot sequence has a quirk where you need to hit a key once the dmesg trace ends before it will give you a login prompt.

Hello!To quote an old friend, "Quite Correct.". (Mr. Spock) Yes exactly, the Linux computer is indeed wearing the device, and its messaging indicated its was discovered. The RasPI did indeed make use of the USB device and told the emulator, I was using Putty in fact, to present me with what the device did on startup. And finally presented me with a logon prompt.

This did not happen with the suggested Windows driver. Now the important question, does Adafrauit plan on asking the chipset vendor about these issues? Or should I simply not worry?

When you say "this did not happen," which 'this' are you referring to: the dmesg crawl during boot, or the eventual 'press a key to log in' part?

If you get the dmesg crawl, both the cable and driver are working as they should. You may need to restart `putty` after the dmesg crawl ends because of some quirk in the way your machine handles the IO connection, but that's a userland issue, not a hardware or driver issue.

When you void a product warranty, you give up your right to sue the manufacturer if something goes wrong and accept full responsibility for whatever happens next. And then you truly own the product.

adafruit_support_mike wrote:When you say "this did not happen," which 'this' are you referring to: the dmesg crawl during boot, or the eventual 'press a key to log in' part?

If you get the dmesg crawl, both the cable and driver are working as they should. You may need to restart `putty` after the dmesg crawl ends because of some quirk in the way your machine handles the IO connection, but that's a userland issue, not a hardware or driver issue.

Hello!The crawl ended before I got the login prompt up when using the linked Windows drivers on this laptop and I did indeed try to restart Putty. Also tried to restart things by unplugging the device and plugging it back in. It was not discovered, and Putty never did find it.

However the modules as drivers on my Slackware Linux version 13.37 found the device and that works. In this case Mike I did indeed get the dmesg crawl and was able to login.

People were advised if they were going to do any work on their devices, they should either use a system running Linux, or failing that a Live-CD of such a system because of that. There was also some issues concerning the actual chipset itself, but that may have been falsely attributed.

Oddly enough the FTDI ones do not have that problem. I've used one such gadget originally made by Parallax for their Basic Stamp devices for hours without any problems, both for the Stamp kit, and for other uses.